But Auckland said the current approach to remuneration was essential for the company’s talent management projects.

“To ensure there are bridges between HR and the business, we currently link part of senior managers’ bonuses to how many high-potential employees they promote and how many they share with other areas of the business, and this is hugely important to the success of our human capital management programmes,” he said.

“While we expect all our bonuses to be cut by the remuneration committee this year, for the third year in a row, the truth is that we have massively outperformed our targets and are now looking at linking bonuses directly to passenger satisfaction as well as to our own regulatory targets,” he said.